A friend, who is rather 'web shy' suggested I post this piece he wrote in comment on an article in recent Sun Herald newspaper.
Dear Leslie,
I wish to address some issues you raised in today’s “Can you be good without God?”.
Clearly, the most significant element in your article was your admission that secular people cannot “know such justifications [as, for example, the Golden Rule] for such ethical injunctions [such as ‘stealing is wrong’] are correct”. According to you it’s an entirely adequate “solution” to this intractable problem for secular ethical theory by claiming that “[u]ltimately, even the most rigorously logical ethical theories require some things be taken on faith.” This is profoundly unacceptable given that your apologetic provides no further warrant for the atheist meta-ethic, preferring to spend valuable column inches punching holes in a straw man opponent, oddly labelled as “believers”. I say oddly because it strikes me as somewhat disingenuous that you initially make a distinction between the two ethical camps on the basis that the “religious” group is faith-based, and thus implicitly is inferior, yet, in the end, this component, faith, is entirely what your own secular defence is constructed upon.
Of course, the assessment of the “religious” ethical theories as being inadequate may be entirely justified, as you allude, in as much as theirs have yet to take Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma seriously. I am the first to admit that many of my fellow Christians stand guilty for proclaiming that something is morally wrong solely because God says it is without as much as a skerrick of supplementary argument.
Nevertheless, as I stated, your article began with what seemed to be a rugged and worthy alternative to the “faith” ethic but, in the end, failed because it borrowed the putative brute fact of its adversary’s “you just have to believe”.
Which brings me to my other point: Why have you begged the question that stealing is wrong? Surely, given that the secular position is ultimately, as you concede, one of faith and not substance, then all things are up for grabs and thus I question that you have an epistemic right to claim that stealing is wrong. Isn’t it at all conceivable in an alternative atheist world that your a priori assumption that stealing is wrong could be restated by the equally justifiable ‘not stealing is wrong’. After all, even in this world I can claim to have met many, many people who believe that stealing from [insert any number of non-me persons or groups here, like, the rich, the poor, multinationals, Woolworths, your neighbour’s husband etc.] is a good thing.
